The contrast between the tragedy of the 18th century and those plays of Shakespeare and one or two other Elizabethans which already before Garrick were known to the English stage, was weakened by the mutilated form in which the old masterpieces generally, if not always, made their appearance there. Even so, however, there are perhaps few instances in theatrical history in which so unequal a competition was so long sustained. In the hands of the tragic poets of the age of Pope, as well as that of Johnson, tragedy had hopelessly stiffened into the forms of its accepted French models. Direct reproductions of these continued, as in Ambrose Philips's and Charles Johnson's (1679-1748) translations from Racine, and Aaron Hill's from Voltaire. Among other tragic dramatists of the earlier part of the century may be mentioned J. Hughes, who, after assisting Addison in his _Cato_, produced at least one praiseworthy tragedy of his own;[236] E. Fenton, a joint translator of "Pope's _Homer_" and the author of one extremely successful drama on a theme of singularly enduring interest,[237] and L. Theobald the first hero of the _Dunciad_, who, besides translations of Greek dramas, produced a few more or less original plays, one of which he was daring enough to father upon Shakespeare.[238] A more distinguished name is that of J. Thomson, whose unlucky _Sophonisba_ and subsequent tragedies are, however, barely remembered by the side of his poems (_The Seasons_, &c.). The literary genius of E. Young, on the other hand, possessed vigour and variety enough to distinguish his tragedies from the ordinary level of Augustan plays; in one of them he seems to challenge comparison in the treatment of his theme with a very different rival,[239] but by his main characteristics as a dramatist he belongs to the school of his contemporaries. The endeavour of G. Lillo, in his _London Merchant, or George Barnwell_ (1731), to bring the tragic lessons of terror and pity directly home to his fellow-citizens exercised an extraordinarily widespread as well as enduring effect on the history of the 18th-century drama. At home, they gave birth to the new, or, more properly speaking, to the revived, species of domestic tragedy, which connects itself more or less closely with a notable epoch in the history of English prose-fiction as well as of English painting. Abroad, this play--whose success was of the kind which nothing can kill--supplied the text to the teachings of Diderot, as well as an example to his own dramatic attempts; and through Diderot the impulse communicated itself to Lessing, and long exercised a great effect upon the literature of the German stage. At the same time, it must be allowed that Lillo's pedestrian muse failed in the end to satisfy higher artistic demands than those met in his most popular play, while in another[240] she was less consciously guilty of an aberration towards that "tragedy of destiny," which, in the modern drama at least, obscures the ethical